How we deal with spam

22 Aug 2008

Spam is a serious problem for any e-mail user. What steps do we take to protect our clients?

For many of our clients, as well as producing their websites, we’re responsible for supplying their web hosting and e-mail too. We currently operate three dedicated web servers in a secure London datacentre, which we’ve kitted out with sophisticated spam and virus filtering. One of the most common complaints we get from customers is the amount of spam they receive. But, thanks to our spam filtering, what actually gets delivered to mailboxes is a tiny proportion of what is actually sent.

The first part of the filtering process happens before we’ve even received the mail. The sender’s mail server “knocks on the door” and provides details of the sender and recipient. At this point we can determine if the recipient address exists, and check if the sender’s server is known to send spam, and any other suspicious behaviour. It’s at this point that most mail is rejected – of just over 60,000 e-mails yesterday (a fairly typical Thursday), 97.7% were refused at this stage.

This still means that around 1,300 mails were accepted to the server. These are then further checked